Head of Reliability & Platform Engineering

McMaster-Carr; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 250,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Signing bonus

Relocation stipend

Job summary

McMaster-Carr is seeking an exceptional engineering leader to define the future of reliability across hybrid on‑prem and cloud environments. You will lead cross‑functional teams, setting vision for reliability practices and guiding multiple domains to improve performance and security.

You will advance incident response maturity, scale platforms, and mentor engineers to build durable, high‑performing systems that power our domain ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Platform Engineering.
• Track record of growing engineers through complex, large‑scale systems work.
• Experience leading systemic improvements: dissect failures and reduce toil.
• Designing and operating resilient, large‑scale distributed systems.
• Expertise operating hybrid environments: on‑prem, cloud, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience implementing cloud security best practices: IAM, secrets, segmentation, hardening.
• Ability to lead cross‑functional initiatives translating architecture into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Define long‑term architectural direction and ensure scalable, secure, performant platforms.
• Design resilient patterns for hybrid service connectivity, including zero‑trust networking and multi‑region failover.
• Harden cloud and on‑prem environments from identity to runtime security.
• Drive incident response maturity with automation, runbooks, and systemic improvements.
• Upskill the team through mentorship and technical coaching.

Job description

McMaster-Carr is seeking an exceptional engineering leader to define the future of reliability across hybrid on‑prem and cloud environments. You will lead cross‑functional teams, setting vision for reliability practices and guiding multiple domains to improve performance and security.

You will advance incident response maturity, scale platforms, and mentor engineers to build durable, high‑performing systems that power our domain ecosystems.